Where is my mind?
How experience design, as an extension of our human obsession with perfecting tools and technologies, helps us to survive and thrive in our evolving world.
By Dave Ebert, VP of UX Design
It’s Saturday morning. It’s cold, it’s early, and I’m at Lowe’s, looking for a very specific section of PVC pipe to finish a project that started without proper planning (imagine that). It’s not for a lack of caffeine that I can’t find it because the sales/support dude with his super special Lowe’s gadget also can’t seem to locate it. As he is calling for backup, I hear the Pixies serenading us with “Where is my mind” through the speakers above and my own mind wanders, imagining how Lowe’s designed their interfaces, plural, because what the floor clerk is using looks and feels very different from what I am using or what I suspect a B2B customer like my friend John’s plumbing company would use if ordering stock parts in bulk. I am brought back to earth to magically see the clerk discover the PVC pipe I need, rescuing it from the wrong bin and rewarding me for my time and patience. I float to the checkout as the Pixies drift away, and I decide to write this article.
Let’s go back to the beginning to really get a sense of why I think this is an important case to crack. And by the beginning let’s choose maybe 1998 or so, the early days of the Internet (capital I, please) when agencies knew that this digital thing was a thing, but were truly not quite sure what to do with it, other than trying to find a way to fend off upstarts like Sapient, Verint, and Razorfish. In those early days, no one (including us, the ones who were Digital (capital D), knew quite what to do out there on the frontier lines of putting a site together. True story: I was once part of a pitch team that had to prep for MasterCard and Visa within one week of each client. We had Visa first, and later that week when MasterCard came in, we asked what they wanted and they said “Whatever you told Visa.” How very Hertz/Avis. But the reason that anecdote matters is that they just wanted us to design (lowercase d) something, anything, and go out there with a thing because they had to have a dot.com in their business model because it was 1998 and everyone else did. The core idea we pitched to both credit card giants was the ability for customers to pay their statements online. They scoffed, and sought better ideas, ones that included making logos bigger.
That was when my Spidey Sense started tingling that there was a future majesty to what being digital could mean, even if it seemed boring to some.
I saw a world where people could conduct their affairs on their own time, as mundane as they might be, but that needed to be completed nevertheless, but that empowered them and put the controls in their hands. Where maybe the work wasn’t always a Flash banner but a simple way for me to view which terminal I was landing in and how close that was to the baggage claim. And even though I was only a lowly Junior Project Manager at that time, I knew that there was probably a better way to define what was meant by “Design” (capital D). Those early failures between companies and consultants led to the much more robust and collaborative model we enjoy today which includes primary and secondary research, journey mapping, voice of the customer (and other) data inputs, technology assessments, and product roadmaps.
In my mind, to really understand what lurks behind the investment organizations are making in much more intentional ways, I think we need to go much further back than 1998. Further back than Mad Men. Further back than Henry Ford and P.T. Barnum, and all the way to cave dwellers, because it’s in those caves that we see proof that humankind has always been obsessed with documenting the known to attempt to solve for and understand the unknown. Cave paintings, and hear me out, are the earliest known depictions of user flows and schematics. Nope, I am serious. In those drawings, human beings are trying to make sense out of the unknown by filtering it through artistic, semantic, and procedural lenses, sketching a crude depiction of an event, a transaction or process. For them, that transaction was “I went hunting and while I was hunting I realized that oh my goodness I should have brought more weapons with me because 12 bison and one me are not great odds and also water buffalo are big so maybe next time I prepare better.” Those drawings offer primitive humans a wall of data, of sorts, from which to glean meaning and adapt and evolve.
So is our process, our quest for meaning in a complex world, and the nature of what we are actually here to solve that much different? Our tools certainly are, and our ability to communicate and render meaning and optionality are as well, but at our core we are driven by the same base instinct. From the moment our partners in Journey Management begin contemplating the wants and needs of our customers, or the examination and organization of data from Voice of the Customer and UX Research studies, to translating those inputs into an experience — is all that same craving to create meaning and improve our station. That thirst for curiosity is truly the differentiator for what makes for world-class, memorable experiences.
I’d argue that if we again hit rewind, this same quest for meaning may have been the agent and the difference between life or death for those cave dwellers.
Admittedly, the act of enabling the floor clerk at Lowe’s to discern the correct version of the PVC pipe I needed by empowering them with a mobile app that can advise on not just the intended aisle and bin location of said pipe but the potential locations for where that pipe may have been incorrectly stored is not necessarily a matter of life and death. But the fact that we don’t have to worry about those stampedes and can turn our attention to the nuances of experience design is proof positive that we have evolved in terms of what we expect from the world around us, and from the technology and tools that serve us. There is absolute and inherent value in experience design, through which we are able to focus our creative and intellectual pursuits into improving the lives of our customers, clients, and advisors with every digital touchpoint.
